".... Eight years ago Saturday, Bush launched the U.S. invasion of Iraq, without an explicit mandate from the United Nations and without much concern over which U.S. allies went along. France vehemently opposed the invasion ...
Fast forward to 2011, and the diplomatic picture is turned upside-down: France has led the charge to intervene in Libya to protect civilians from Moammar Gadhafi's rampage, and President Barack Obama is the reluctant warrior, ..... Instead of American "shock and awe," there is time-consuming diplomacy and careful consideration of options.
While the Iraq war and the Libya crisis differ fundamentally in many ways, the question now, according to outside experts, is whether Obama's multilateral approach will turn out any better than Bush's unilateralism. Will the mere threat of military action begin a slap of dominoes that leads to Gadhafi's departure? If French and British jets bomb Gadhafi's military assets with little effect, will the U.S. be pressured to take a more active, even leading, military role? Who will rebuild Libya once Gadhafi is gone — or if his country fractures into two demi-states?
"However this ends, it ends with heavy burdens," said Daniel P. Serwer, a retired U.S. diplomat with experience in conflict and post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere. The prospect of such burdens has, by all accounts, made Obama averse to rushing into Libya and willing to cede the lead role to others. The legacy, and costs, of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seem written all over his policy..... The U.S. and the international community writ large have limited "spare capacity" remaining for military intervention or reconstructing shattered nations, Serwer said. A post-Gadhafi Libya could see revenge killings on a large scale, he said, and because of Gadhafi's complete dominance of society for nearly 42 years, there are no independent state institutions, as in Egypt or Tunisia. "I see a state-building task here that hasn't been talked about at all," he added. "The point is, this is just the beginning."
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During the Bush years, the President and the media jointly spent a lot of time focusing on terror. We were constantly being set up as if at any moment we might be attacked again. That had two impacts – some people solidified their support for the President, believing that all the actions he was taking were necessary to protect us; others thought he was manipulating the public, thus solidifying the anti-war protests. Obama has not chosen that approach.
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